Constructor: Rebecca GoldsteinRelative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)
THEME: CREATED A MONSTER (38A: Emulated Dr. Frankenstein ... or what you did after you filled in the shaded parts [so, the circled squares] of 17-, 23-, 50- and 61-Across) — monster names are buried inside familiar phrases:
Theme answers:- LINTROLLER (17A: Good accessory for the owner of a shedding dog)
- NOGREATSHAKES (23A: Nothing to write home about)
- DRAGONESHEELS (50A: Move reluctantly)
- PRIDEMONTH (61A: June celebration honoring the Stonewall uprising)
Word of the Day: PEDRO Almodóvar (
1A: Director Almodóvar) —
Pedro Mercedes Almodóvar Caballero (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpeðɾo almoˈðoβaɾ kaβaˈʝeɾo]; born 25 September 1949)[1] is a Spanish film director, screenwriter, producer, and former actor. His films are marked by melodrama, irreverent humour, bold colour, glossy décor, quotations from popular culture, and complex narratives. Desire, passion, family, and identity are among Almodóvar's most prevalent subjects in his films. He is known for his collaboration with Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz, who both later became international film stars. He came to prominence as a director and screenwriter during La Movida Madrileña, a cultural renaissance that followed after the end of Francoist Spain.His first few films characterised the sense of sexual and political freedom of the period. In 1986, he established his own film production company, El Deseo, with his younger brother Agustín Almodóvar, who has been responsible for producing all of his films since Law of Desire (1987). Almodóvar achieved international recognition for his black comedy-drama film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) which premiered at the Venice film festival. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and went on to further success with films such as the dark romantic comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), the melodrama High Heels (1991) and the romantic drama thriller Live Flesh (1997). His next two films, All About My Mother (1999) and Talk to Her (2002), earned him an Academy Award each—for Best Foreign Film and Best Original Screenplay, respectively. He followed this with the drama Volver (2006), the romantic thriller Broken Embraces(2009), the psychological thriller The Skin I Live In (2011), and the dramas Julieta (2016) and Pain and Glory (2019), all of which were in competition for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Parallel Mothers (2021) opened at the Venice Film Festival. (wikipedia)
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This is a cute idea for a Monday theme. It's a very basic theme type—hide-a-word, or nest-a-word, or whatever you wanna call it—but the revealer phrase is clever and the general quality of the theme answers keeps it from feeling ordinary. My criticisms here are fairly predictable, in that they are things I've said before. First, with embed-a-word themes, if the embedded word isn't touching / involved in every word of the theme answer, it feels less than elegant. So today, for instance, the TROLL and the DEMON are handled perfectly, because no word in the theme answer is left out of the monster's reach, whereas with the other two, you've got SHAKES and HEELS just hanging out there flapping in the wind, not touching their monsters at all. And then I always balk at "ONE'S" phrases; they always feel like phrases that you're much more likely to hear (in the wild) with YOUR instead of ONE'S. ONE's is defensible, but it always feels clunky. Clunkier today because HEELS is not the word that most naturally completes that phrase. You drag (one drags) your (one's) FEET. It's true. The HEELS phrase is, of course, a real one, but FEET, in this case, is the mot juste.
I would not have minded MAKE A FIST but MADE A FIST is bugging me a little. Changing MADE to MAKE would not be hard, and I don't understand putting something in the past tense like that if you don't have to, especially when the present tense gives you the imperative voice that would really make the answer pop ([Instruction from a phlebotomist, maybe], something like that). See also STEPS ON IT, which is a defensible phrase but is many times better as a command (though today you could not make that change because of answer-length considerations). In general, though, the grid is very clean and far from boring, despite being very heavy on the short stuff.
If you have to put THEY and THEM in the same grid, why not cross-reference them as a potential example of someone's pronouns? If you don't link them, it really feels a bit like cheating—they're just the same word in different cases. There's no need for either THEY or THEM; you can get rid of either of them pretty easily, especially THEM. Turn THEM into TRIM and WAX into TAX, for instance. Anyway, if you want both, link them. Otherwise, lose one. I think that's it. Better than SOSO, I think. Now I think someone should use this hide-an-answer puzzle to start a new hide-an-answer puzzle where CREATEDAMONSTER is one of the theme answers in a hidden cheese puzzle. Or a hidden actor puzzle. Good day.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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